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Flipping through the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was best known for making sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she required pianos without the cover to allow her to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if further recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. And though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through meditative practices all shone through in conversation."

Within her more recent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist trying to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, shows that that drive stretched back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she fuses these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an artist in complete command. That's exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, Brubeck call Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the great promise of the internet